Computer Science with Business & Management (3 Years) [BSc]

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Requisites

Additional Requirements

Students who are not from the School of Computer Science must have permission from both Computer Science and their home School to enrol.

Pre-requisites are waived for CM students.

Overview

This course is a 50-50 mix of theory and practical development/implementation. The first project is a competition between the students to produce the best bot to play a particular game. The bots compete against each other in a tournament. Thestudents seem to enjoy this very much. The second project involves a game in which the students compete against the lecturers in a price-setting game. The students appreciate the industrial relevance of this project.

Assessment methods

Syllabus

What is a game? (Definition of game tree, pay-off function, normal form, extensive form.)

How can we describe a game plan? (Definition of strategy, representations of same.)

What does it mean to play a game well? (Definition of best-response strategy, equilibrium point and similar, discussion of the validity of these concepts, discussion of alternatives.)

How do we find good game plans? (Complexity of finding equilibrium points, minimax algorithm, alpha-beta pruning, discussion of the components of a typical game playing program via evaluation function and alpha-beta search).

What are some of the processes that can be modelled using games?

Semester 2:

The aim of this semester is to understand the following topics.

What are Stackelberg (Leader-Follower) games? What constitutes a solution to a Stackelberg game? How can learning and optimization be used to learn good solutions? Applications to price setting and marketing will be discussed.

What is reinforcement learning and how is it applied to on-line learning? What are the important mechanisms of on-line learning? How can reinforcement learning be applied to games situations?

Recommended reading

Feedback methods

Feedback is provided is several ways. Half of the course involvesgroup projects which take place in a drop-in lab where the studentscan work, and get feedback on what they are doing. For each project,each group must make a presentation, and feedback is providedverbally. In addition, written feedback is provided.